A man who was jailed for 17 years for a drive-by shooting he didn’t do will get $12 million from San José. This is the biggest settlement the city has ever paid in a case of police misconduct.
The City Council accepted the settlement on Tuesday. It happened after a federal judge didn’t agree with the city’s reasons to throw out Lionel Rubalcava’s federal lawsuit, who was found guilty of shooting up a gang in 2002.
The council members agreed to the deal but didn’t say anything about the payment in a statement.
Three witnesses said they saw Rubalcava, but in May 2019 they changed their minds and said they didn’t see him. Cellphone tracking evidence showed he was driving to Hollister when the killing happened.
Lawyers for Rubalcava said in the case that police officers Topui Fonua, Joe Perez, and Steven Spillman ignored evidence that cleared him and “deliberately misrepresented witness statements” that led to his conviction.
Judge Beth Labson Freeman said that a jury could figure out that three San José police officers “lied in the police reports to deprive [Lionel] Rubalcava of constitutional rights” when she turned down the city’s request to throw out the case.
The court date for the case was August.
“The county of San José made the right decision today,” said Amelia Green, one of Rubalcava’s lawyers. “We would have shown clear evidence of serious police misconduct at trial.” “Not only should our client never have been prosecuted — the city should have long ago accepted responsibility for Lionel’s wrongful conviction.”
In a lawsuit he filed after getting out of Pleasant Valley State Prison, Rubalcava said that detectives violated his civil and due-process rights by ignoring proof that showed he was innocent.
For our safety and security, we should be able to trust the police, Rubalcava said in a statement. “In my case, the San José Police Department singled me out and framed me for a crime I didn’t commit.”
Richard Rodriguez, 19, was shot on April 5, 2002, and was left partly paralyzed. Rubalcava was arrested three days later.
During the trial, both the police and the prosecutors said that a fight between two gangs caused the killing.
One of the witnesses later changed their story at the trial, and Rubalcava’s lawyers said that the police’s explanation for the shooting didn’t make sense because he and Rodriguez were said to be in different Norteño street gangs and weren’t enemies.
Rodriguez and his mother both told the police that they didn’t think Rubalcava was the shooter and that they thought members of a rival Sureño gang had targeted Rodriguez.
The Northern Innocence Project at Santa Clara University School of Law took up Rubalcava’s case and freed him. Then, the Santa Clara district attorney’s office told its verdict integrity unit to look into the case again, and the other witnesses changed their stories. In 2019, the office asked the higher court to throw out Rubalcava’s sentence.
The lawyers who worked for Rubalcava were from Neufeld Scheck Brustin Hoffmann & Freudenberger.
“Neither Lionel nor the victims were served by the corrupt police work that led to an innocent man being prosecuted and the true shooter going free,” said Nick Brustin. “Lionel’s case is yet another example of how racism infects the criminal legal system, in which police too often are willing to prosecute any available young man of color.”
